Dakim [m]Power at 150 senior living communities

Inter­est­ing mar­ket news:

Dakim’s [m]Power Adopt­ed by 150 Senior Liv­ing Com­mu­ni­ties … (Busi­ness Wire)

- “Dakim Inc. announced today that its [m]Pow­er® Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Sys­tem has now been adopt­ed by more than 150 senior liv­ing communities”

- “Users include Sun­rise Senior Liv­ing, Front Porch Com­mu­ni­ties, Diakon Luther­an Ser­vices, Ecu­men, Eska­ton, Bench­mark Assist­ed Liv­ing, and Los Ange­les Jew­ish Home for the Aging. Sev­er­al neu­rol­o­gists and a local Alzheimer’s Asso­ci­a­tion chap­ter office have also pur­chased the system.”

- “Oth­er prod­ucts are sta­t­ic. You buy a CD, put it in the com­put­er, and that’s it. Peo­ple get bored and stop using them. Dakim has found a way to keep peo­ple com­ing back to chal­lenge their abil­i­ty, and that’s what our res­i­dents are doing. (said said Dou­glas Edwards, Direc­tor of Fund Devel­op­ment for West­min­ster Gar­dens in Duarte, Cal­i­for­nia, part of the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Pres­by­ter­ian Homes)

Com­ment: senior liv­ing is one of the obvi­ous areas where com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing (or “brain fit­ness pro­grams”) has a brighter future to com­ple­ment and enhance exist­ing health and well­ness pro­grams in scal­able ways, as we cov­ered in our Mar­ket Report. We are no longer sur­prised by the week­ly press releas­es announc­ing a new “brain fit­ness cen­ter” in com­mu­ni­ty XYZ. Now, what I find inter­est­ing is that last quote by Dou­glas Edwards, which I inter­pret as a direct com­men­tary on the Posit Sci­ence Brain Fit­ness pro­gram, the oth­er lead­ing ven­dor for the senior liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties market.

For relat­ed articles,

- Report High­lights: includ­ing our esti­mate of 400 res­i­den­tial facil­i­ties offer­ing these kind of tools by end of 2007

- 10-Ques­tion Eval­u­a­tion Check­list: for any­one con­sid­er­ing buy­ing a program

- Build Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve-Yaakov Stern: inter­view with a lead­ing Cog­ni­tive Reserve researcher, on the poten­tial val­ue and lim­i­ta­tions of com­put­er­ized “brain fit­ness programs”.